An official [from the International Atomic Energy Agency] familiar with the matter, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to comment, said the release appeared to be continuing.

Some scientists have made some unlikely claims about the source of the radiation. For example, as Reuters notes:

Professor Malcolm Sperrin, director of medical physics at Britain's Royal Berkshire Hospital, said any link with Fukushima was extremely unlikely.

"It is far more likely that the iodine may be as a result of excretion by patients undergoing medical treatment. Whilst such patients are carefully controlled, some release of iodine into the environment may be inevitable but would certainly be well below any limits where health detriment would even begin to be an issue for concern," he said.

(It is unlikely that patients in so many countries would all start excreting more radioactive iodine at the same time.)

The Czechs deny responsibility, but are sending mixed signals. As AP notes:

In Prague, an official at the Czech State Office for Nuclear Safety said he was "100 percent sure" that the radiation had not come from any Czech nuclear power plant — or from any other source on Czech territory.

[However,] speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to talk to the media, the official said tests are under way around the country to try and identify the source.

The Czechs are betting heavily on nuclear power and have plans to dramatically increase production ....

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New Moon, Worst Thanksgiving Week ever in trading, free BPT newsletterIt's a new moon. Market has NOT been in tune with the 20 trading day moon cycle for months. Usually after that happens, the moon and market do become synchronized and that lasts for several months.

HBB loves their bonuses, and consumers feel better when market is going up. Hard to imagine that the Santa rally does not occur, but being nimble and reassessing the information in front of me works a heck of a lot better than being married to a viewpoint.

Matt annotated all the T-day charts from the "worst" and most did have a trade-able bounce esp. into Jan 1 bonus time. A chart says a thousand words, check them out on free link below.

Matt from BPT did an excellent T-Day review, and is letting us post it in full right here. Enjoy! Their service is best in class, and combines theory and practical daily information. Sign up using link on right on my blog, BUT get this one for free, link here

The government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) are trying to achieve a stable condition called a "cold shutdown" of crippled reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant by the end of this year, but they have yet to come to grips with exactly what is happening inside the reactors crippled by the March 11 earthquake and ensuing tsunami.

The doctor is either an idiot or a liar. That widespread an area of contamination can only come from a nuclear disaster. Unless the doctor can show proof that radioactive iodine is exclusively used in treatment, and of such widespread distribution, he should retract his statement.

EPA: "We have found radioactivity in the United States on crops, in water, and on homes. Therefore, we must raise your taxes to pay for all of this "cleanup" to corporations who will do nothing, immediately."

The US is doing a massive cover-up. The EPA simply elevated the level of "safe radioactive exposure" after it was found that many US locations have increased levels. See? Problem solved! Thank you, dear EPA!

If it's Fukushima doesn't that imply that it passed over the USA, Atlantic ocean and that maybe we are only seeing increased readings in Europe because they aren't lying/covering up or have not disconnected their sensors yet?

Radiation Nutrition Tip 2: Eat iodine rich foods. Seaweeds are a great source of iodine, so adding these into your diet is a good plan. A body that has sufficient iodine will not uptake radioactive iodine isotopes like a body that is deficient. (Keep in mind, though, that these isotopes that are showing up are iodine).

Radiation Nutrition Tip 3: Eat detoxifying foods like chlorella. Chlroella has shown promise when it comes to removing metals from the body, so adding this food can’t hurt – from a radioactive heavy metal standpoint. Keep in mind, chelation therapy is likely to be more effective at removing heavy metals – radioactive or not.

Radiation Nutrition Tip 4: Don’t panic. Acute food neurosis can cause stress and illness. If you’re always panicked about the food you’re eating, I can almost guarantee – sooner or later – you’re going to get sick. You may not be able to control the amount of radioactive material in our environment, but you definitely are able to control how you think and react to it.

I often wonder what mercury (and other heavy metals), dioxins, and PCBs you're exposing yourself to by eating seaweed harvested around the poluted coasts of the US and Europe. OK, you'd be upping your iodine levels; but ingesting god knows what else. For instance - I wouldn't eat post-Fukushima Japanese seaweed to up my iodine levels, would you? After all, the seaweed has to get its iodine from somewhere, and that somewhere is Japanese coastal waters...

Also, seaweed is used as a fertilizer and is often applied to organic produce. The suppliers I contacted all told me that their product came "from the clean waters of the North Atlantic" i.e. from contract harvesters in Maine. They did not specifically test for heavy metals.

Personally I need a good source for chicken sh!t. Washington DC is too far to drive.

Fukushima is deploying a tent/concentrate/blow methodology to control isotope dispersion. They put a tent over the reactor, capture and concentrate the steam or other output, then blow it up a smokestack and try to get it into the upper atmosphere.

FFS There is an ongoing nuclear incident at a melting down power station with a number of breached reactor cores and people are so stupid as to wonder where strange radiation readings are coming from? Seriously?!

I flew from Switz to Europe and measured a 3,33 microsieverts maximum when we hit cruising altitude. This is double what it was not long ago.

I contacted loads of aviation departments around the world to try and see if we are measuring the radiation in the atmosphere and whether 3,33mS is a cause to worry or not. Funny (If it wasn't sad) as the last one in the email banter below refers me back to the first one I contacted.....great.....oh, and apparently we are not measuring atmospheric radiation..... But don't worry, just keep flying!!

Thanks Nigel. Does no one monitor radiation levels over the UK on an ongoing basis then? With Fukushima ongoing for the next 30 years (according to TEPCO) it would be good keep an eye on this I would think?

A Geiger counter reading on its own may not give an accurate estimate of the effective tissue dose of ionising radiation. Additionally, I should point out that environmental radiation levels, including cosmic radiation, are not constant.

I attach a link to the IATA medical manual, which has a good section on cosmic radiation which may be of interest to you:

I have had no response from your “advice” email address so far. Here below is my question again after being referred to a different address this time (and I also included below all the replies from various UK Govt. bodies).

“On a recent flight from Zurich to London I measured 3.33 Microsieverts/h at cruising altitude. Please can you tell me how "normal" this is? I am sure it used to be only around 1.50 Microsieverts on this route?? I have a Polymaster personal geiger counter that has proven very accurate in my own testing.”

Radioactivity in the environment comes from different sources. This includes natural radiation, residue from the Chernobyl accident and atmospheric weapons testing, as well as radioactive discharges from nuclear and non-nuclear sites.

It is our job to control radioactive discharges and carry out environmental monitoring in England and Wales. We make sure that levels of radioactivity in the environment and the amount of radiation the public are exposed to stay below legal limits. please see the following link to our website for details:

At normal passenger jet cruising altitude (around 30,000 to 40,000 feet) you may have been experiencing atmospheric radiation. Unfortunately we do not monitor atmospheric radiation at that altitude over European countries (although we may monitor it around a nuclear site here for example).

You may want to contact the Civil Aviation Authority regarding this matter. Their website is:

I hope you can answer my query or point me in the direction of someone who can.

On a recent flight from Zurich to London I measured 3.33 Micro-sieverts/h at cruising altitude. Please can you tell me how "normal" this is? I am sure it used to be only around 1.50 Micro-sieverts on this route?? I have a Polymaster personal geiger counter that has proven very accurate in my own testing.

I cannot for the life of me make out what you are on about, bothering all those people, whose jobs, in this age of austerity, are probably hanging by a shoestring...it is possible that you are of a certain age, and therefore need to finetune your understanding of the role of government, and it's servants, in the millenium we are presently part of: so let me help out...

to whit, the role of government, Fred, is to collect things....taxes, vast amounts of data about you and the rest of the taxpayer base, criminals, such as those of you who neglect your obligations as indentured servants to the state,er, that is to say, taxpaying citizens, entitlements for serving politicians and their support staff, and most important of all, to collect more debt...so that we can perform our role as members of an international community of democratic societies which proactively seek out opportunities to stimulate reform and development on the part of less advantaged countries. There is no element of this new, performance based governmental mandate which involves us giving out things Fred: be they information, pensions, protection of person or property, or any such spurious notions which may be occupying your aged mind....

I hope the forthgoing is useful to you in clarifying your governments' role, and yours related to IT! Please bear in mind that we will be monitoring your grasp of this information, and compliance with its' implications.

That's right.If it were radioactive veggies being grown in Ma & Pa Kettle's garden in Dubuque, Iowa, the Federalies would have 7 swat teams, 4 APC's, 9 decontamination units with Huey Cobra air support within 3 minutes of the fucking readings to kill Ma & Pa, not because of the radiation, but for growing the fucking vegetables.

There is no fucking accident likr this.WTF. And now they say they can't find it?

Anyway.. The NY Times article seems to have been SANITIZED??!!This sentence has been edited: "A glance at my radiation reader revealed the levels were 300 microsieverts per hour – the highest reading of my visit."

Kudos for GW for continuously keeping tabs on the deteriorating circumstances. Please remember, contrary to an oil spill, which will be absorbed into the ecosystem in a decade or two, the effects of these radioactive isotopes are CUMULATIVE.

It's all falling apart, and they're pushing everywhere to get the contracts for new fission powerplants.Here's an interesting talk about nanotech carbon stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wHGh2eRbLEIt seems to me, the casual observer, there are alternatives on the horizon. Anyone that has some info on the Rossi Cataliser project?

Oh to top it off, the Phobos-Grunt satillite will return to the surface at the end of the month or so. Some radioactive Cobalt and a heap of nasty fuel, were supposed to get the bacteria strains to that moon, Phobos. It didn't quite work out that way. Coïncidence or sabotage as well?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lue5pmXiVhM

'Active margins', such as where Fukushima is situated, are almost always cross-cut with many inactive faults (i.e. not moved for as much as a few hundred million years or so) and occasionally, a still active fault network. The general public jump fair out of there feckin skin at any mention of a 'fault line', it's one of the hot-button fear-mongering topics., and almost always complete bunk.

The reality is almost all faults are defunct - BEEN INACTIVE FOR A VERY LONG TIME in human terms, and are rather unlikely to ever move again. Sometimes these old dead faults 'reactivate' after a few million years of doing nothing, but that's unusual. What rather often happens is the stress field changes and propagates further away, and the area of active faulting migrates away from the old fault, and creates new faults many miles away.

This routine process of active-margin crustal deformation is why you check the rocks, via drill coring, to examine any structures present, and date when they last deformed that area, before you build any stuff like the Dai-ichi complex.

The real issue here is that these sediments are rather 'young', and thus still poorly 'consolidated', in geological terms ('Quarternary' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaternary - basically, sediments about as old as humanity's oldest known early ancestors), but have been ruptured by a younger vut CURRENTLY INACTIVE fault.

You could look under almost any industrial-scale building in Eastern Japan and you will find such inactive faults. They are very common structural features of such uplifted and rotated sedimentary terranes, but rarely are these faults actively periodically deforming the sedimentary-pile. The vertical movement measured at Dai-ichi after the quake was a regional event, lot a local one.

When sedimentary blocks uplift and rotate within a sequence of dippin thrust faults, typical of a "benioff-zone" like this terrane, let's say along approx north-south oriented series of faults, as in Japan, then one side of the block will rotate downward, as the other side is rotated upward. etc. But these moving upper crustal blocks, in the Japanese context, are on the scale of tens of kms across, with smaller networks of localised fault ruptures within them.

And that is the nature of what has happened under Dai-ichi, within the past million year or so - small-scale local slumps amd rupturing. It's not that there is zero risk from such a fault but it's very low risk over the time-scale of human civilisations.

The real risk at Dai-ichi, as we have just seen, is the powerful seismic waves from far bigger and deeper active fault-ruptures, 80kms away, and what happens to the ocean when these move.

We should keep such things in perspective, is all I'm saying, because the general-public (that's you BTW) has Z E R O sense of perspective and of proportions, on a good day, especially when it comes to anything remotely geological, geodynamic or geotechnical.